The Space Review: Can Elon Musk retire on Mars in 2023?

SpaceX has plans to use its Dragon spacecraft as a Martian lander;
can Elon Musk turn this into a Mars settlement plan in a decade?
(credit: SpaceX)

Can Elon Musk retire on Mars in 2023?

by Sam Dinkin
Monday, February 11, 2013

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971. He’s planning to retire on Mars. He appears to have amassed a good deal of capital. He joined the Forbes 400 in 2012 with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion. He has a rocket company with a NASA contract and plenty of satellite launch contracts, including eight flights for Iridium on its launch manifest.

There’s a proposed SpaceX Mars mission called “Red Dragon”. Elon Musk can fund a half dozen of these missions, at an estimated price of $400 million, with his current fortune at retail prices. Six times 1,000 kilograms of payload to Mars seems like a very tight mass budget to handle a retirement. Fortunately, the mass budget may rise as prices drop.